Lifeboat Foundation

The goal of roboticists has long been to make A.I. as efficient as the human brain, and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology just brought them one step closer.

In a recent paper, published in the journal Biology, scientists were able to successfully train a neural network to recognize faces at different angles by feeding it a set of different orientations for several face templates. Although this only initially gave the neural network the ability to roughly reach invariance — the ability to process data regardless of form — over time, the network taught itself to achieve full “mirror symmetry. Through mathematical algorithms, the neural network was able to mimic the human brain’s ability to understand objects are the same despite orientation or rotation.

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Move over, chemists. Thanks to proteins from Icelandic bacteria, scientists at Caltech have managed to coax microbes into making silicon-carbon bonds, a feat that until now has been achieved only by humans in the lab.

The findings, published last week in the journal Science, could open the door to new avenues in organic chemistry and drug development — and could help scientists investigate essential mysteries, such as whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon on other planets.

A University of California, Riverside assistant professor has combined photosynthesis and physics to make a key discovery that could help make solar cells more efficient. The findings were recently published in the journal Nano Letters.

Nathan Gabor is focused on experimental condensed matter physics, and uses light to probe the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. But, he got interested in photosynthesis when a question popped into his head in 2010: Why are plants green? He soon discovered that no one really knows.

During the past six years, he sought to help change that by combining his background in physics with a deep dive into biology.

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A synthetic metabolic pathway developed by Tobias Erb and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg converts CO₂ from the atmosphere into organic matter more efficiently than plants are able to through photosynthesis. We asked the researcher what significance this process could have for climate protection, discussed the hurdles the research team had to overcome to achieve their goal, and looked at the new perspectives that synthetic biology opens up.

Does the synthetic metabolic pathway that fixes CO₂ now represent an effective means of curbing climate change?

Firstly, we are aiming to understand the fundamental biological and chemical principles of how CO₂ in gaseous form can be converted into organic molecules. Our primary motivation is not stopping climate change. We are seeking to develop atmospheric CO₂ as a source of carbon for the future using biological methods. Producing a CO2-neutral process or even one that removes CO₂ from the atmosphere and has a positive impact on the climate would be a fantastic secondary effect.

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Scientists have managed to coax living cells into making carbon-silicon bonds, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon — one of the most abundant elements on Earth — into the building blocks of life.

While chemists have achieved carbon-silicon bonds before — they’re found in everything from paints and semiconductors to computer and TV screens — they’ve so far never been found in nature, and these new cells could help us understand more about the possibility of silicon-based life elsewhere in the Universe.

After oxygen, silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and yet it has nothing to do with biological life.

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The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain — which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer.

Isher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits — quantum bits of information — in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system. It’s challenging enough to do quantum processing in a carefully controlled laboratory environment, never mind the warm, wet, complicated mess that is human biology, where maintaining coherence for sufficiently long periods of time is well nigh impossible.

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In future, greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere by deploying a new biological method. A team headed by Tobias Erb, Leader of a Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, has developed a synthetic but completely biological metabolic pathway based on the model of photosynthesis that fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere 20% more efficiently that plants can photosynthetically. The researchers initially planned the new system, which they presented in the magazine Science this week, on the drawing board and then turned it into reality in the laboratory.

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere owing to human activities has continually risen since the start of the Industrial Revolution. All scientific evidence indicates that this increase is exacerbating the greenhouse effect and changing the climate. The consequences are already clearly evident. To overcome the environmental as well as the social challenge of climate change, “we must find new ways of sustainably removing excessive CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into something useful,” underlined Erb, who leads a Junior Research Group at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg.

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In Brief

• Researchers have discovered that placing synthetic genetic circuits in liposomes prevents them from interfering with one another, while still allowing them to communicate.
• Not only could this new form of “modular” genetic circuits lead to more complex engineered circuits, it could also provide insight as to how the earliest life on Earth formed.

By applying engineering principles to biology, researchers can create biological systems that don’t exist naturally. A problem of synthetic biology, however, is that these engineered genetic circuits can interfere with each other. While beneficial on their own, some of these man-made circuits become useless when they come in contact with each other, and this bars them from being used to solve complex biological problems.

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There weren’t many people who had heard of bioterrorism before 9/11. But shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, a wave of anthrax mailings diverted the attention of the public towards a new weapon in the arsenal of terrorists—bioterrorism. A US federal prosecutor found that an army biological researcher was responsible for mailing the anthrax-laced letters, which killed 5 and sickened 15 people in 2001. The cases generated huge media attention, and the fear of a new kind of terrorist warfare was arising.

However, as with every media hype, the one about bioterrorism disappeared quickly.

But looking toward the future, I believe that we may not be paying as much attention to it as we should. Although it may be scary, we have to prepare ourselves for the worst. It is the only way we can be prepared to mitigate the damages of any harmful abuses if (and when) they arise.

Continue reading “The Future of Extremism: Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology Will Transform Terrorism” »